Personalization: Is It Effective on New and Repeat Users?

This work studies personalization from the perspective of human computer interaction. The objectives are to examine the effects of various personalization strategies on users’ information processing and decision-making. We commence by reviewing the literature on personalization in the five research domains defined by Banker and Kauffman (2004), and then highlight the debates regarding the effectiveness of personalization in influencing users’ decision-making. To bridge the gap between the proliferation of personalization technologies and the uncertainty of their effectiveness, this work addresses the following research question: What are the effects of different personalization strategies on users’ information processing? We examine two common personalization strategies: preference matching and set size of personalized content. We explore how these strategies affect users’ decision-making. An information processing model rooted in the Heuristic-Systematic Model is developed. We formulate 10 hypotheses on the relationship between personalization strategies and users’ information processing. Data collected from two online field studies are used to assess the validity of the proposed hypotheses. The results of the studies indicate that personalization can capture users’ attention, and, personalization is also associated with an increase in users’ exploration of other content. This effect becomes less salient when the amount of non-personalized content increases

Gain and Loss in System Switching: A Behavioral Economics View to Understand the Joint Effects of System Usage Performance on User Satisfaction

Information systems acceptance has long been an interesting topic for both researchers and managers. It is necessary to understand user’s attitudes and behaviors toward an information system so as to evaluate the consequence of system implementation. Different from previous research, this study investigates user acceptance toward a newly introduced system from a behavioural economics perspective. Specifically, the study targets the effects of system usage outcomes on user satisfaction in a mandatory context where an old system is replaced by a new one. Based on the Prospect Theory, we argue that users evaluate the new system according to their perceptions from a value function, comparing their current system usage status with a reference point in terms of gain and loss. By describing a three-stage system switching process, this study unpacks how the usage outcomes of both the old and the new system and their contrasts affect perceived value toward the new system, which positively predicts user satisfaction. The system usage performances related to both the old and the new system are incorporated in the research model. Their joint effects, the main and the interacting effects, on user satisfaction with the new system are explicitly explored and explained. Findings of the study enable firms to better understand a system switching process and to design more effective managerial interventions for improving new system acceptance

Technology Features, Empowering Perceptions, and Voicing Behavior on Microblog

Recently, we have observed rapid growth of individual daily technologies such as microblogs, and the technology’s influence on people’s social life. To investigate such self-determined technology usage, we choose an empowerment perspective as our theoretical lens, because the empowerment concept highlights human beings’ proactive nature. We investigate a specific microblog usage, i.e. publicly voicing personal views on social affairs, which is an initial yet fundamental step in citizen participation. The study reveals that microblog features have transformed the way social news disseminate, and hence influence information quality and users’ social network building. These changes further influence users’ empowerment perceptions through raising users’ perceptions of internal political self-efficacy, autonomy, meaning, and impact. The more empowered users are, the more likely users will voice on microblog. We integrate context into our theorizing, and the empowerment framework allow us to uncover the psychological mechanism through which microblog technology features enable voicing, a specific technology usage

Using Genetic Programming as a Learning Tool in Discovering Financial Trading Rules

The growth of database systems has called for more advanced information retrieval and knowledge discovery tools. Genetic programming is proposed as one such tool and its characteristics and strengths are discussed in this paper. The application of genetic programming in learning security trading rules is also discussed

An Affective Model for Unauthorized Sharing of Software

Software piracy has been studied by academics, software firms, law enforcement agents and policy makers for many years. Previous research in software piracy either did not differentiate between unauthorized copying and unauthorized sharing, or focused only on unauthorized copying. We believe the motivating factors behind the two behaviors are quite different because beneficiaries of the behaviors are different. In this paper, we consider unauthorized sharing as a kind of helping behavior and draw on relevant literature to see if the motivations behind unauthorized sharing can be better appreciated from an affective perspective. We tested the affective model of unauthorized sharing based on empirical data obtained from a large-scale survey. We found from the survey that both perceived affordability and perceived convenience could arouse sympathy or annoyance with the unauthorized copier, and their effects were mediated by perceived controllability of the need of unauthorized copying. Our results support the strong effects of affective factors on the moral obligation of unauthorized sharing

Online Community Citizenship Behaviors (OCCB) and Community Sustainability: An Examination of Benefit Creating Behaviors in Online Communities

Online communities now reach various aspects of people’s work and life; and both practitioners and researchers have recognized their importance. However, among the tens of thousands of online communities, a considerable portion of them gradually become lifeless, with little ongoing conversation and few active members. Since online communities largely rely on members’ participations to generate benefits, it is important to identify the behaviors that contribute to community sustainability. Specifically, the research questions are: 1) Besides knowledge contribution, what are the behaviors contributing to online community sustainability? 2) What is the nature of these behaviors? How do they benefit communities? Comparing online communities with organizations and referring to Organization Citizenship Behaviors (OCB), we conceptualize the benefiting creation behaviors as Online Community Citizenship Behaviors (OCCB), which have the following characteristics: 3) Discretionary 4) Beyond personal needs gratification 5) Promote the effective functioning of the online community We then identify the dimensions of OCCB, viewing online communities as complicated social entities which people go to with various needs to be fulfilled. Previous IS research mainly focuses on people’s information needs and examine knowledge sharing. Referring to social psychology studies on human needs and small group interaction analysis, we highlight that people also have social emotional needs, and argue for the importance of social emotional support on community sustainability. Behaviors offering social emotional support contribute to community relationship building, help to attract new members, and attract posts asking for social emotional support. We also examine behaviors related with community norm development and maintenance, such as recognizing other’s contribution, discouraging inappropriate behaviors. These behaviors cultivate community reciprocity norm and a friendly social atmosphere. They create strong bonding among members, retain members, and encourage members to contribute. We also note community participants may leverage other Internet platforms, such as personal blogs, to promote the community. Specifically, members’ recommendations on other platforms may generate publicity for the community and help the community to attract new users, hence we include cross platform community promotion in OCCB. Overall speaking, how to make online community sustainable is a question of both practical and theoretical interest. We address this question through investigating the benefit creating behaviors, i.e. OCCB. The study goes beyond knowledge contribution, and highlights behaviors related with social emotional needs gratifying, group norms forming, and group publicity. We propose that OCCB have positive influence on membership size, attracting posts seeking knowledge and social support, and hence make the community more influential and sustainable in the topical area; and we suggest ways to help community develop sustainably

Economics of shareware: How uncertainty and piracy affect shareware quality and brand premium

In the past, shareware has been mainly used to market small and simple software, the developers of which could not afford to distribute their products through a physical retail channel. Shareware was often distributed through complimentary floppy or CD disks attached to PC or games magazines. However, with increased network speed, it has become viable for digital files, even large ones, to be distributed over the Internet. The Internet channel has opened up new opportunities for developers, small or large, to distribute their products as shareware to reach consumers directly. Indeed, in recent years, we begin to see big firms, including Microsoft, Adobe, and Google, distributing their products as shareware. We find that shareware is an increasingly widespread marketing strategy for selling software products via the Web. Because the emergence of shareware has not been driven by economic concerns, there is limited analytical research on shareware. However, as shareware gains in popularity as a strategy to reduce consumers\u27 uncertainty about new software products, there is a need for deeper understanding of the economic implications of its use. This paper analyzes the interrelationships among key issues that are central to the software industry, including uncertainty, piracy, shareware quality, and full version price. We show that customers\u27 aversion to the uncertainty of software quality tends to increase shareware quality while piracy tends to decrease it. Counter intuitively, the perceived quality of the full version software or the trust toward the software developer does not affect the full version price and the profit of the firm when piracy is prevalent

Economics of shareware: How do uncertainty and piracy affect shareware quality and brand premium?

Increased network speed has opened up new opportunities for developers to distribute their products as shareware through the Internet. This paper analyzes the interrelationships among key issues that are central to the software industry, including uncertainty, piracy, shareware quality and full version price. We show that customers\u27 aversion to uncertainty of software quality tends to increase shareware quality while piracy tends to decrease it. Counter-intuitively, the perceived quality of the full version software or the trust towards the software developer does not affect the full version price and the profit of the firm when piracy is prevalent. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Risk of Using Pirated Software and its Impact on Software Protection Strategies

The software protection strategy of software developer and the inherent risk to end user in using pirated software are two major factors that affect a user’s decision on whether to purchase or pirate a software product. This paper analyzes the optimal protection strategy for software developer in horizontally and vertically differentiated markets. We find that the implementation cost of software protection constitutes the primary factor for software developers to determine their software protection strategies. However, in a vertically differentiated market, the lower quality product should always adopt a non-protection strategy, regardless of the protection implementation cost. In other cases, protection would only be optimal if the protection implementation cost to the software developer is relatively small. These findings are consistent with anecdotal evidence

InvestLM: A Large Language Model for Investment using Financial Domain Instruction Tuning

We present a new financial domain large language model, InvestLM, tuned on LLaMA-65B (Touvron et al., 2023), using a carefully curated instruction dataset related to financial investment. Inspired by less-is-more-for-alignment (Zhou et al., 2023), we manually curate a small yet diverse instruction dataset, covering a wide range of financial related topics, from Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam questions to SEC filings to Stackexchange quantitative finance discussions. InvestLM shows strong capabilities in understanding financial text and provides helpful responses to investment related questions. Financial experts, including hedge fund managers and research analysts, rate InvestLM's response as comparable to those of state-of-the-art commercial models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Claude-2). Zero-shot evaluation on a set of financial NLP benchmarks demonstrates strong generalizability. From a research perspective, this work suggests that a high-quality domain specific LLM can be tuned using a small set of carefully curated instructions on a well-trained foundation model, which is consistent with the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis (Zhou et al., 2023). From a practical perspective, this work develops a state-of-the-art financial domain LLM with superior capability in understanding financial texts and providing helpful investment advice, potentially enhancing the work efficiency of financial professionals. We release the model parameters to the research community.Comment: Link: https://github.com/AbaciNLP/InvestL